In the old days, at this point, we would retire to Bannermans.

Oh well.

David Hume is the glaring exception

Guy: my teacher on questions of fluidity is Ilya Prigogine (Order out of Chaos) who actually got a Nobel prize in areas related to chaos in water flows, etc.

Edward: “I think we very often need to start from the whole”: this is one of my main points, methodology these days is often analytic without ever returning to the whole, and there’s a tendency for the more successful partial science (e.g. econ) to claim precedence over the less (e.g. sociology), and using this precedence as an excuse to ignore the factors less successfully studied.

,a href=”http://www.idiocentrism.com/decision.htm”>Here is a fuller development of this idea.

Of course, so think Alan Greenspan (or Ben Bernanke) and inflation expectations. I don’t think they have realised the implications of all this yet.

And this, of course, brings our sidetrack right back on-topic.

“Even very nice, aware, literate analytic philosophers seem entirely impervious to what I’m saying. They really want to keep their philosophy as a specialist science while relegating public philosophy and generalist thinking into an inferior, amateur, hobbyist sort of activity.”

I’d say fluidity would be a serious job for open-minded philosophers as well.

That is why this would be Nobel Prize stuff

Consider also the Two slit paradox, (link = http://home.btconnect.com/scimah/Quantumphenomena.htm )

“Therefore the observer’s mind is in some way determining the outcome of the observations.”

In other words: to observe is to change. I do believe quantum physics and chaos theory should come in handy in dealing with fluid models. In any case a complex theory like fluidity would have to be multidisciplinary.